Inside the MATLAB Desktop
March 29th, 2007
Shortcuts for commonly used code
If you haven’t discovered Shortcuts yet, you should. Shortcuts are useful for storing small snippets of m-code that you regularly run. If you find yourself typing the same 3 or 4 lines of code everyday, you should select those lines in the Command History (or the Command Window) and drag them up to the Shortcuts Toolbar in the Desktop. This will automatically create a shortcut on the toolbar.
A dialog will open where you can modify the code, give it a catchy name, and even change the icon.
The shortcut shows on the Shortcuts Toolbar.
Shortcuts also show in the MATLAB Start Button. In the Shortcuts menu in the Start Button, you will find all of your Shortcuts including the Toolbar Shortcuts and any Help browser favorites you may have bookmarked. In this area, you can create more categories of shortcuts for even greater storage capacity and organization.
When your shortcuts start getting a little disorganized, you can open the Shortcuts Organizer from the Shortcuts Toolbar context menu or the Start Button Shortcuts menu. In this dialog, you can move items up and down and into categories, rename items, create new categories, and delete items.
So, if you haven’t already, give Shortcuts a try. It is as easy as drag and drop.
Do you have a favorite Shortcut? We’d love to hear what it is.
By
Kristin Thomas
Kristin is a developer on the MATLAB Desktop team. She works primarily on the Command Window when she is not throwing herself down a mountain on her snowboard.
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Hi Kristin,
1) Is there a way to modify the layout so the shortcuts will be accessible in the lower part of the screen ? (if getting there thru “Start”, have to cascade thru two menus)
2) I have three favorite shortcuts:
Delete All Children
——————-
delete(allchild(0)) % stronger than close all
Maximize
——–
function maximize(figs)
if (nargin==0)
figs=findobj(’Type’,'figure’);
end
for i=figs’
% get state
Name=get(i,’Name’);
NumberTitle=get(i,’NumberTitle’);
set(i,’NumberTitle’,'on’,'Name’,”)
drawnow
showwindow(sprintf(’Figure %d’,i),’showmaximized’)
% reset state
set(i,’Name’,Name,’NumberTitle’,NumberTitle)
end
Toggle Stop On Error
——————-
function ToggleStopOnError
s=dbstatus;
if (isempty(s))
dbstop if error
fprintf(’Stop on Error ON\n’);
else
if (isempty(strmatch(’error’,{s.cond},’exact’)))
dbstop if error
fprintf(’Stop on Error ON\n’);
else
dbclear if error
fprintf(’Stop on Error OFF\n’);
end
end
There is not currently a way to move the start button to another location. We are looking into other ways we can display this information and also considering allowing users to add folders to the shortcuts toolbar which would allow you to store more information on the toolbar and have it be categorized.
I like the toggle stop on error. I am sure this will be useful to others.
Great article, Kristen. Since I work with a lot of time series data, I’ve become a huge fan of linkaxes to link zooming across multiple axes. This lets me see what’s happening at a particular time for data spread across multiple plots. This leads to my favorite shortcut:
Title: X Link Zoom
Code:
linkaxes(findobj(0,’Type’,'Axes’,'-not’,'Tag’,'legend’),’x'); zoom on
Icon: \toolbox\matlab\icons\view_zoom_in.gif (close enough)
What about the possibility to have faster access to the shortcuts directly from the editor window.
Creating graphs directly from the editor I use shortcuts to toggle grid, hold, etc and would welcome this possibility.
Michel
I like these shortcuts. I’ve been trying to create a set of shortcuts on start up, but the method described in the documentation does not work (adding ‘/r filname’ after the target in the matlab shortcut. This is described in the “Startup Options in Windows Shortcut” section of the documentation).
Is there a way to automatically execute certain commands when matlab is launched?
Hi David,
The documentation refers to creating Windows application shortcuts. These are different. In a windows application shortcut, you can add “-r function_name” after matlab.exe to get MATLAB to run code after it initializes on startup. You can also create a startup.m file and place it in your startup directory to achieve the same effect. You should be able to find more info on startup.m in the doc too.
Does that help?
Hi Michel, Do you mean that you would like a shortcuts toolbar in the Editor? I’ll put in an enhancement request for that.
Hi Kristin,
Thanks, I will certainly appreciate it a lot.
As 95% of my work is done from the editor window, I do not like to interrupt the going stream of work by switching to the command window.
It can be very useful if I could put a function on the shortcuts bar. I am thinking on selecting a variable or a set of variables from the Workspace or even the command window press the shortcut and run the desired function.
Thanks for the feedback Amir.
Hi Kristin,
When I add/remove/modify shortcuts in the Toolbar, they seem to be reflected in the shortcuts.xml file immediately.
Is there a way to update the shortcuts in the Toolbar, when I modify the shortcuts.xml file?
My goal is to update the Shortcuts Toolbar using scripts. Please let me know if you have any suggestions.
Thank you,
Vidya
Hi Kristin,
I found the following response in the newsgroup:
>>> Michael wrote:
>>> Is it possible to set and delete shortcuts by command line?
>>It is not currently possible. I do have an enhancement request to
>>provide an M command to do this and I will consider it for a future release.
>>Kristin
I would like to know if this feature is available now and if so, for which Matlab release?
Thanks in advance,
Vidya
Hi Vidya,
This is still not available. And we are still considering it for a future release. Thanks for letting us know you are interested in this feature.
Kristin
This is my favorite shortcut, a Windows Explorer shortcut for the current directory. It’s on the Matlab file exchange at:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=14140&objectType=FILE
Regards,
Stead
That’s a good one Stead: winopen(pwd). What tools is the Current Directory browser missing for you that make you want to open Windows Explorer? Is this something we could fix?
One of the main reasons I need to open Windows Explorer is to use TortoiseSVN for source/revision control. TortoiseSVN ( http://tortoisesvn.net/ ) is a Subversion client that is implemented as a Windows shell extension that integrates into the Windows Explorer. On the surface, the Matlab Current Directory browser looks a lot like the Explorer and it would be handy to be able to access the TortoiseSVN contextual menu from there, but that may not be practical.
Also, its a lot faster to navigate (and look for files) with Windows Explorer, especially since the Current Directory browser doesn’t have an integrated folder (tree) view.
Thanks for asking!
Stead
Where is the shortcut’s info stored?
Is it possible to pass all the shortcuts to another user?
Javier - if you type “prefdir” at the MATLAB command line you will see the directory where they are stored. In that directory, there is a file called shortcuts.xml. If you make changes to the file manually, you will want to do it while MATLAB is closed.
There is not currently a way to import in another users shortcuts. I do have an enhancement request to provide that functionality in the future.
Hi,
Is there a way to add shortcuts to Simulink (in the menu of a model)?
Or is there a way to modify the the menu(File Edit Debug Desktop…) to add your own menu items for Simulink (and/or Matlab)?
Thanks
Robin
Robin,
You can add items to the Simulink menus by adding a sl_customization.m file to your MATLAB path. Details can be found by starting here: http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/toolbox/simulink/index.html?/access/helpdesk/help/toolbox/simulink/ug/bqt2_v7-1.html&http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/toolbox/simulink/helptoc.html.
This is a bit out of our area, so for further advice you should contact technical support (see link at the right), post to comp.soft-sys.matlab or bug Seth to create a post on his blog about that.
As for the main MATLAB menu, we do not currently support that functionality, but we will take it under consideration.
Thanks for the great question.
Hi,
is there a way to use shortcuts to insert some text at the cursor position in the Matlab Editor (on Windows)?
I thought of an ActiveX or Java solution, but I appreciate any hints.
Regards,
Daniel
Hi Daniel,
There is not currently a way to insert text into the MATLAB Editor programatically. I’ll create an enhancement request for this.
-Ken
This is my “cleanup” shortcut
clc % clear Command Window
close all hidden % deletes all figures including those with hidden handles.
bdclose all % closes all system windows
imtool close all % closes all image tools
com.mathworks.mlservices.MLEditorServices.closeAll; % close MATLAB editor
com.mathworks.mde.desk.MLDesktop.getInstance.closeHelpBrowser % close the doc page
com.mathworks.mlservices.MatlabDesktopServices.getDesktop.closeGroup(’Web Browser’) % to close an URL open with the WEB function
com.mathworks.mlservices.MLCommandHistoryServices.removeAll; % to clear the history
clear all % remove items from workspace, freeing up system memory